Beyond the venue: Hybrid MICE infrastructures and urban representation in Busan

This article examines how official MICE discourse in Busan, Republic of Korea, represents digital and hybrid event infrastructures as part of destination positioning. Rather than treating post-pandemic digitalization as evidence of a completed transformation from physical venues to platforms, the study asks how technical capacities, institutional curation, audience address and place narratives are articulated in public MICE texts. A bounded qualitative discourse analysis was conducted on a fully auditable corpus of 12 publicly accessible institutional documents published or available between 2020 and 2026. The analysis identifies four recurring but unevenly distributed representational repertoires: a dominant global-meeting and competitiveness repertoire, a smart/platform-mediated repertoire, a cultural-experiential repertoire, and a more concentrated maritime repertoire. The article develops the middle-range concept of representational infrastructure to describe how MICE technologies and institutional arrangements can become media through which a destination is described and positioned. The study does not measure audience reception, actual accessibility, algorithmic governance or destination-image effects. Its contribution is therefore interpretive rather than causal: it shows how official MICE texts connect event infrastructure to strategic narratives of urban competence, selective visibility and place identity, while also clarifying the empirical limits of claims about platform power and destination legibility.